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Cloud Elements Takes PaaS-centric Track

Working on the premise that a PaaS-centric approach to cloud application and development based on external services is superior to a monolithic, IaaS approach. Cloud Elements, a consultancy and application integrator, announced that it has picked VMware and its open-source Cloud Foundry as the basis for its cloud application development offerings.

Cloud Elements, a seven-month-old company with 20 employees and 12 clients, currently offers its clients pre-built elements that integrate common services, reducing the time and expense required to build highly functional cloud apps by 50 percent over traditional, infrastructure-based approaches. Twenty-five services that can be integrated into cloud apps range from e-mail to payments, and include Twilio for text messaging apps, PayPal for payments, Xendesk for customer service and management, and Box.net for file-sharing.

Cloud Elements CEO Mark Geene says his company is the only VMware ecosystem partner to feature such a PaaS-centric service, and he is pleased by VMware's announcement of The Pivotal Initiative, which is headed up by longtime VMware chief and current EMC chief strategy officer Paul Maritz. This initiative, which draws on resources from both EMC and VMware, including VMware's vFabric, Cloud Foundry and Cetas organizations, is being created to "enable a new generation of workloads that can exploit the advancements VMware is driving in the datacenter." In Geene's view, The Pivotal Initiative raises the tide, and boosts the market for PaaS-centric application development.

"The Pivotal Initiative further validates that we have picked the right platform to work with," Geene states. "As a partner in the VMware ecosystem, we are very happy." He is also quick to note that his service, which is evenly split between subscription and traditional license agreements, avoids the kind of ungainly, monolithic, vendor lock-in associated with Microsoft Azure. "Azure can't be deployed and moved to your private cloud," he adds.

By way of contrast, Geene points out that the combination of services, technology and reusable software elements with Cloud Foundry Core makes it possible to build apps that can be "ported instantly to any Cloud Foundry Core-compatible cloud, including multiple public cloud providers and private instances that Cloud Elements installs and manages."